'Kate Noakes' poetry has always treasured vivid language, and does so here - just savour her nectar-sipping bat that 'gigolos away the dark'. But this rich and varied new collection also strikes a new note, as quietly compact as the water-worn stones that appear in several poems, spare but alive with implications, like a whole life in wartime conveyed by 'And now / the kissing away of two long winters. Him here.'Philip Gross (TS Eliot Prizewinner)

'Kate Noakes is a poet on the
road, on the wing, in transit, yet rooted in place, childhood, family, love.
She records detail as in a journal, gathering experience, words, traveller’s
tales. A pebble is ‘a travelling spot’ that ends as ‘nothing but light’, teller
of Earth’s journey. The pebble’s beginning is the poet’s beginning, a child
pond-dipping, picking up stones. A memorable poem records her grandfather throwing
his medals into the river on his way home from the war, as if horror could be
washed away. It survives in his grand-daughter’s imagination, and in her vivid poems.'